Tuesday, September 26

The Church and the Environment

What a great discussion!

Sarah has posted a wonderful entry on her musings about getting the church, as a corporate body, involved in a more active role of environmental stewardship. She's looking for ideas, so if you've any thoughts on the subject, please stop by and share them. (You must have an account to leave a comment w/ xanga, so if you don't have one, please feel free to leave your thoughts here. Forewarning, though, comments are moderated, and while I don't filter out dissenting voices, I do filter out sheer nastiness.)

I haven't pursued this line of thinking before now - it's a new twist on the idea, though, and so far some good discussion has spring up from it. One of the things I'd love to see (coming from me, not from Sarah, I'm not sure what her thoughts on it are) is how best to bring this issue to the table without making, or creating, a partisan political rally out of it. How best to take the individual into the corporate without creating a sticky wicket of ire from the left and the right. Or if it should be brought into the corporate realm, at all?

Anyhow, come and join in the discussion about Cristianity and environmentalism. The two aren't mututally exclusive - quite the opposite, in fact - so how can the church, as a body, pick up the ball and run with it?

Kiss those babies!
~Dy

8 comments:

Kathy Jo DeVore said...

I have no ideas, but I will say that it's one of my pet peeves that many equate care for the environment as a communistic ideal that no God-fearing Christian should be concerned about. I've actually read Christians making comments like, "The earth is here to serve MAN, not man here to serve the earth." But tell me, please, how we're loving our neighbor when we support industries that poison our water supply, pollute our air, and add toxic chemicals to the food we eat? Favoring profit and convenience over the health and well-being of others is NOT a Christian ideal.

Okay, rant over. :) I'll be looking forward to reading the responses to this. Great posts, Dy and Sarah.

mere said...

I just went and read Sarah's post, and I find this fascinating. Here in Austin we are blessed with a great example of a working organic urban farm. They are not associated with any church...it's strictly a business but they are passionate about what they do. Here is a link if you want to see them in action:

http://www.boggycreekfarm.com/

I think stewardship is something we all need to be concerned with. I have a horribly brown thumb, so I don't feel like I could grow enough food to feed my family, but I know people who do. A deacon from our church, who is 73 years young, has a huge garden, and brought home grown okra to church in a a bucket every Sunday for about a month, because he and his wife had eaten as much as they could stand. He may not have realized it, but his okra helped me put food on my table and it was truly a blessing.

I think if a church has any land it might be appropriate to use it for a church community garden. I also think that if you are serious about having a garden or small scale farming in the future it is essential to learn to like the foods that it is possible to grow in your area. Some people hate okra, but it grows like a weed here, so it's great if you like it.

I think also that we need to teach our children to live simply and to be content. We need to teach them how to use their hands as well as their minds. Not everyone in the world can or should be a white collar worker. We need plumbers too. We need people who can build housing. We need small farmers.

That's my two cents.

Anonymous said...

our church has gotten involved in the fair trade coffee industry - sell it and serve it. we also host forums on many environmental issues ( among others) Next week we're hosting 2 FREE showings of An Inconvenient Truth. Showings are followed by discussions. We're going to be bringing The End of Suburbia as well. We actively recycle, reduce and conserve power.

Ernest said...

Cognitive dissonance at work. Break it down into the two basic premises in conflict:

1. Accept the premise that all creatures have a right to live and a right to defend that life with all means granted to them at their disposal. The gazelle can run from the lion, the badger can fight with tooth and claw, etc.

2. Runaway industrialism is destroying the Earth which God has granted to us to be caretakers.

The bible is FILLED with stories of caretakers who had to pick up a weapon and go out and defend something in their care. Samson fought the Philistines. David killed Goliath. Many a shepherd killed a wolf to protect his flock. In essence, the bible is telling us that we will at times need to put ourselves in harm's way in order to protect what has been given to us to protect.

So here's where cognitive dissonance comes in. Premise #1 and #2 lead us directly to a situation. We are empowered to protect our lives and the planet, and both our lives and the planet are currently being threatened. It's all well and good to buy coffee from independent farmers, but really, how much are you helping there? 90% of the rain forest has been cut down to support small independent farmers. They aren't destroying the rain forest so mega-corp can move in and build a Walmart there. It's so the small farmers can have land.

Anyhow, Christians have a dilemma. Once we accept both premises, then it's clear that A) the world and our lives are in trouble and B) we have to do something.

Buying coffee isn't going to stop industrialists from cutting down every tree in Alaska or dumping poison into the rivers. At some point, we are going to be forced to take active measures to stop these people, quite probably with violent means. Which also contradicts our biblical teachings.

So to promote enviromentalism in a church is to recognize the problem, and to recognize the problem will lead people to the next logical conclusion. However that next logical conclusion is a very painful one and society isn't ready to meet that leap.

Abolitionist clergy preached for a long time on the evils of slavery before a John Brown was born.

Ernest said...

Ok, I'm going to add something about the comments here, including the one by my wife.

"For every thousand hacking away at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root." - Henry David Thoreau

Planting a garden, buying coffee, recycling, turning off an extra light bulb ... all hacking at the leaves. The root is the corporations who are poisoning the world we live in. They SELL toxic waste back to us as a mineral beneficial to our health. Can you not see how far we have come?

Corporations which pollute the land need to be dismantled and the people at the heart of this made accountable for their actions. Voting with our dollars is no longer enough because the entire system is still propping them up. My involuntarily collected taxes go to support criminal corporations that are destroying our land.

We must dissent. Dismantle the destructive infrastructure while we still can. Force our government to stop catering to the corporate hegemony.

John Locke put forth the concept of "natural law". From his premise comes the theory that government can hold no power except the power to support an individual's right to protect himself and his property. It is evident that our entire nation is based on principles the founders lifted from the writings of Locke.

Kathy Jo DeVore said...

It's a tad difficult to convince people to hack at the roots of evil with you when they still think the leaves are harmless and kind of pretty. People first have to be aware that there IS a problem because there can be no real dialogue with people coming from the premise that we don't need to change anything at all. Sometimes you have to convince them that if they continue rolling around in that spot, they're going to itch like crazy tomorrow. But until they're convinced, no one is going to help you try to pull up the pretty leaves by the roots.

Ernest said...

Kat, as always, is my anchor to sanity and pulling me back from the edge. Without her I'd be living in a shack somewhere writing manifestos.

And I agree that mankind hasn't yet woken up; that they're still listening to Mother Culture who tells us we have the right to do whatever the Hell we want with the planet because it's ours, we were gifted it, and mankind is the ultimate product of 20 billion years of celestial creation.

Unfortunately they can take down those of us who see the dangers of hubris as well. We're all on the same ship and when some idiots poke holes in the bottom and eat all the food then we all will suffer.

I'm advocating that sometime in the near future it will be necessary to restrain those idiots, or throw them overboard.

Dy said...

See, and here I was thinking that perhaps it's not the church, as a corporate body, that ought to be leading it, but we, as believers, who need to hike up the overalls and adjust the checkbooks and start living it. Sort of a proof is in the pudding approach, like we do with homeschooling. We evangelize by living the way we are supposed to, and people are inevitably drawn to it. (And, of course, the converse - blow it, and everybody will point and say, "Pfft, Christians!")

But now y'all have gone and given me WAY too much to think about. I appreciate it. :-)